I write crime fiction, regularly, and I am very interested in dishonesty. There’s major crimes, such as rape and murder, and minor crimes, like car theft and house burglaries. But by far the most entertaining crime is The Confidence Trick. How is it possible, I often wonder, for mature, educated people to be conned, and conned so easily? And repeatedly. And often.

In Britain today, the whole population is being conned at the present time. It’s a con called ‘The Banker’s Bonus’. The way it goes is this: first, you tell people a story, that Chief Executives in banks are special people, with extraordinary powers to make money, (for the investors and the depositors), and these talented individuals need to be rewarded for their efforts. You try and sound ‘reasonable’. You don’t exaggerate and you don’t push it. You just do it, set up a bonus culture where the CEOs get extraordinary pay levels. The result? The man on the car park, lifting the barrier every day, to let the executives drive through, in their chauffeured cars, receives an annual salary of, say, ten thousand pounds. The Chief Executive – the man, and it’s usually a man, in the car, getting driven around in a free vehicle that he doesn’t have to pay for or maintain – gets paid one hundred times that!

Why is that ‘a con’? Because, although pay levels have gone up in this country at a steady state over the last generation, executive pay levels have screamed ahead at a far higher rate, widening the gap between lowest paid and highest paid and making them increasingly far apart. If you’re paying these ‘special people’ huge salaries, then there should be a special reason. Perhaps they possess some special powers which are beyond the wit of normal men? Perhaps they are especially gifted or trained beyond the norm? Unfortunately for this scenario, the education of CEOs is the same as it’s ever been – Business Schools think more of themselves these days, but don’t deliver anything ground-breaking or novel, certainly no different from what was on offer back in the 1970s. And the thing that really lets the whole assertion down, is that most of the people who attain high rank in the world of banking, don’t actually know much about running banks. If you look at the CEOs of major banks in the country, you will see that most of them come from some other area of retailing. As bankers, they aren’t ‘experts’ at all – merely beginners.

Worse than that, the whole ‘high pay’ culture is fomented and controlled by people in a narrow field, namely, Chief Executives themselves! Although banks talk grandly about ‘Remuneration Committees’ that ‘set pay levels’, these people are not independent at all; they are mostly people from inside the institution – who have much to gain by increasing top pay levels, (after all they might benefit from that themselves, one day, when they get promoted), aided by a few ‘invited outsiders’, ie Chief Execs from other banks and similar financial bodies. These people then invite each other to sit on their own ‘Committees’. This merry-go-round ensures the old maxim, ‘You do me a favour and set my pay high, and I’ll do the same for you, when the time comes, old boy’.

Finally, the real expose to the whole rotten system, is that there’s no downside. If bank executives are being ‘rewarded’ for achievement, then it should be obvious that they won’t get a reward when times are tough. Far from it. Bank executives get bonuses whether the bank makes a profit or not! A reasonable person might be persuaded that successful businesses should reward their leaders for doing well, but the fact that those same institutions pay out huge rewards even in tough times, makes a mockery of any faux justification proffered.

Because, of course, there is an alternative. In Britain, we have a thriving football sector, where competition is fierce and achievement is richly rewarded. However, football managers are judged by results, and if your team is winning, then you get a fat bonus. If your team isn’t scoring points and moving forward, however, then you get the sack. It’s tough, but it’s fair. More important, it’s clear to everyone, fans and critics alike, what is happening: if the team isn’t making it on the pitch, then the manager isn’t counting his bonus. No such culture exists in the world of banking, and their kind of highly-paid Chief Executives. If banks were football teams, then they would be paying out bonuses to failing Managers and rewarding under-achievement and loss, as their clubs went crashing down the League Tables. Luckily, British football clubs are a lot less easily deceived. They don’t get conned, and they reward effort and punish failure. It’s a lesson that every bank could learn.

Mike Scantlebury is an Internet Author. Several of his novels are now up on Amazon, (and a few available on Kindle). He is a UK resident, having made the exciting city of Salford his home, where football is king, music is cool, and politics is sharp. Share his new crime fiction novel about electing a Mayor for Salford at http://www.Salford.me/

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